A very, very old book receives a new life on the web. The Codex Sinaiticus is now available on line. The very, very early version of the Bible dates back some 1600 years. The codex is not complete, at least as it was originally written, but the on line project does reunite the four major pieces of the book for everyone to see.
History | Gaius July 6, 2009 | 
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A really, really grim prediction from Louis Woodhill, a member of the Club for Growth’s Leadership Council (and a fellow engineer): Get ready for 14% unemployment. (Please stop reading if you are depressed. Seriously.)
The BEA numbers (which were revised slightly on June 25) show an accelerating decline in “real nonresidential fixed investment”. This measure decreased 37.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009, compared with a fall of 21.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008. Given that employment is a direct, linear function of private business investment (PBI), unemployment can be expected to rise much farther in the months ahead.
Here’s why. Because a lot of PBI goes toward offsetting depreciation and increasing productivity, it takes a 5% year-over-year increase in PBI to produce a 1% increase in the number of jobs. Correspondingly, a 5% decrease in PBI will yield a 1% reduction in total employment.
The unemployment rate a year ago was 5.5%. Because the potential labor force is growing, we need employment to increase by 1% annually to keep the unemployment rate from going up. The 37.9% investment decline reported by the BEA can be expected to eventually produce a reduction in total employment of about 8.5%. Accordingly, we can expect unemployment to rise to about 14% within a year unless the downward slide of PBI is reversed.
The current 9.5% unemployment rate is causing great economic pain, and life with a 14% jobless rate would be much, much worse. Unfortunately, almost everything that the government has done or is proposing to do to right the economy is actually counterproductive.
If the underemployed and the discouraged who have given up looking for work in Obama’s utopia are counted, we are already at 16.5%. Add another 4.5% to the “official” numbers and we are going to be facing 21% real unemployment – depression level unemployment.
And this is not an inherited problem - this is a direct result of the policies of the Obama administration. Investors are trying to buy whatever security they can for their money by buying Barack’s Bailout Bonds – and as a result, there is no money for creating jobs.
Government does not create jobs or wealth. It leeches off productive people and institutions. At the moment, the leeches are sucking the host dry and rapidly killing prosperity and wealth in this country. And dooming us to a much, much worse economy in the very near future.
Economy, Politics | Gaius | Comments (2)
So goes Obamanomics. Kevin Hassett, writing at Bloomberg:
Last week, we discovered that the state of California will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
With California mired in a budget crisis, largely the result of a political impasse that makes spending cuts and tax increases impossible, Controller John Chiang said the state planned to issue $3.3 billion in IOU’s in July alone. Instead of cash, those who do business with California will get slips of paper.
The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat.
It takes years and years to make a mess as terrible as the California debacle, but the recipe is simple. All that you need is two political parties that are always willing to offer easy government solutions for every need of the voters, but never willing to make the tough decisions necessary to finance the government largess that results. Voters will occasionally change their allegiance from one party to the other, but the bacchanal will continue regardless of the names on the office doors.
California has engaged in an orgy of spending, but, compared with our federal government, its legislators should feel chaste. The California deficit this year is now north of $26 billion. The U.S. federal deficit will be, according to the latest numbers, almost 70 times larger.
And that deficit is rising rapidly – with even more psychopathic spending and brutal taxation already in the pipeline. I don’t agree with everything Hassett writes here. For one, I think taking small bites of a growing pie is much better than taking ever-increasing bites of a shrinking pie is a better formulation for long term success. But he still makes several excellent points.
California, we are assured regularly by the media, is a bellwether for the rest of the country. We would do well to remember exactly where the word bellwether comes from:
Middle English belle ‘bell’ + wether ‘castrated male sheep’
Economy, Politics | Gaius | Comments (3)
Did Nancy Pelosi single-handedly doom the Democrat’s majority in the House come election day 2010? If this scenario plays out in enough districts, she very well may have.
New Mexico Democrat Harry Teague’s decision to vote in favor of cap-and-trade energy legislation has guaranteed that he’ll be facing a frontline Republican opponent in 2010.
Former New Mexico congressman Steve Pearce told POLITICO today that he is running for his old House seat – primarily because of Teague’s vote on the energy bill. Pearce had been preparing to run for governor, but said Teague’s vote forced him to rethink his priorities.
“The cap-and-trade vote [from Teague] is the thing that put my decision over the hump,” Pearce said in an interview with POLITICO. “I was absolutely stunned over his vote. When he made the cap-and-trade vote, the hostility in the district was reflected in the way we feel out here. There are 23,000 statewide jobs in the oil and gas industry – and if this bill is passed, this will kill many of those jobs.”
It isn’t just the announcement of a first-rate challenger – it is the reception Teague got over the 4th of July holiday from constituents back in the district. This is the stuff that makes dream political advertisements (or nightmares if you are Teague):
When pressed about whether [Teague] had read and understood all 1,300 pages of the bill and all the provisions it contained, he said, “I have staff people to do that for me.” When asked why he would vote for a bill that would tax every American an additional $3,000-plus a year, he answered, “It is really only about the amount of a postage stamp.”
The citizens present seemed to have difficulty getting their arms around that answer.
Well, sure. If your postage stamp costs $3,000 and you’ve just lost your energy sector job.
If enough Democrats faced this kind of reception back home, there will be a massive backlash against this bill in the Senate. We can but hope.
I remember reading something one worried Democrat said right after Pelosi forced the vote on the Crap and Tax bill. He was worried that a lot of Democrats had walked the plank for something that would die in the Senate, anyway. This story makes that even more likely.
This could well have been a suicide pact for House Democrats. How’s that for hope and change?
Via Memeorandum
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